Market research firm Canalys reports that Apple achieved a 19.5 percent slice of global, combined PC and tablet sales in the fourth calendar quarter of 2013. That's a larger share of unit sales than Dell and HP together, and well in advance of second place Lenovo and third place Samsung.

Canalys counts tablets

Canalys is unique among market research groups (including Gartner, IDC and Strategy Analytics) in that it recognizes tablet shipments as being a key segment of the PC industry.

The firm notes that tablets now account for nearly 50 percent of PC unit sales.

Other research firms used to include tablets in their PC market share reports during the two decades where most tablets were boosting the numbers attributed to Microsoft's Windows. When Apple began selling tablets, Gartner and IDC began to exclude the iPad, counting it separately instead as a non-PC "media tablet."

That gerrymandering of the PC market didn't stop Apple's iPad from having a profound impact on the PC market, it just distracted attention away from the clear and obvious trend among consumers and the enterprise in favor of iPads at the expense of conventional PC form factors.

Apple's iPad share increasing despite cheap tablet alternatives

Canalys reported that, including tablets, the global PC market grew 17.9 percent, with tablets accounting for all of that growth. Year over year, tablet sales grew 64.2 percent to reach 76.3 million units.

Tablets accounted for 48.3 percent of all PC sales, while non-tablet PCs alone declined by 6.9 percent over the previous year, "with falls in all regions" the company stated.

Apple's iPad accounted for 26 million tablet sales, or more than a third of all tablets sold. That share increased from the 27.3 percent slice of tablets Canalys reported in the year ago quarter. Including Macs, Apple sold a total of 30.9 million computers.

Canalys also noted that Apple has an even greater 38.3 percent share of tablet sales in China, where cheap alternative devices are readily available.

"But competition is mounting and Android tablets are falling in price, which will put pressure on Apple's market share in 2014," Canalys warned.

Technology is evolving more quickly that the categories in peoples' minds. What is a PC these days? What if it's your watch, but also your Apple TV, a cloud server, and the processor in your toaster? What if Apple seamlessly integrates all those devices with data spanning them?

I would argue that not only is an iPad a PC, an iPhone is also a PC.

The hands free in my car is becoming a PC.

The watch is becoming a PC.

Each of those devices is gaining far more than the capabilities that any box running a desktop OS ever had.

So.... why are will still categorizing these things based on their physical shapes? Who cares if it's shaped into a desktop box, an oval, a watch, a car handsfree, a pocket gizmo, or an etherial cloud?

The categorizations should evolve more quickly along with the technology that's causing everything to blur.